Some futurologists are so plausible you wonder if they know something nobody else does. Alternatively, they are total fantasists. I got that eerie feeling today while reading an article by Robert X Cringely over at PBS.

His thesis? Google is about to take over the Internet (via Web 2.0) using the techniques of Wal-Mart. What are the techniques of Wal-Mart? Pile up cheap boxes all over the place and sell them cheap-cheap-cheap, proclaiming choice-choice-choice. Well, you know what I mean : pile ‘em high and sell ‘em at an empty box price.

What’s this got to do with Google? This is where it gets interesting. Apparently the devilishly “do no evil” duo has an underground car park which very few are permitted to enter. In it they have a very ordinary, and very dull, shipping container ~ one of those big boxes that shippers stack on incredibly boring freight liners.

Inside the container they are piling as much memory and processor power as modern tech will allow. According to the all-knowing frog : “about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig.”

The notion is to plant one of these utilitarian data-centers in places where Google owns access to fiber, “basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.”

They then plan to offer all manner of Web-based services which will operate with the speed and efficiency of a desktop app, and have the redundancy and backup to keep the system as resilient as it can be.

“Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. … But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.”

This could be a disaster for Microsoft, especially, “… all the other web services companies will be marginalized. There will be startups and little guys, but no medium-sized companies. … And the final result is that Web 2.0 IS Google. Microsoft can’t compete. Yahoo probably can’t compete. … And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That’s less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year. Game over.”

It’s a stunning scenario. Whether it’s anything more than supposition I can’t say, but it has a feasibility that leans toward “must be true”. After all, if Cringely can dream it up, so can the people at Mountain View, who ARE buying up “dark” fiber, and who are not going to become an ISP. Leaving aside assumptive logic, which joins up dots to reach astonishing conclusions, only something this big would surely interest Google after what has gone before. Owning the online world is an extraordinary prospect.

Microsoft should look to its laurels, and then beyond … and even further than that.

[Via Robert X Cringely]